Restaurant Report: Kachka in Portland, Ore.

Image

Herring Under A Fur Coat, with potatoes, onions, carrots, beets and eggs.CreditCreditStuart Mullenberg

By David Farley

Oct. 21, 2014

At Kachka, a Russian restaurant that opened in Portland in April, there are no servers wearing Red Army garb, no silly dish names referencing Communist rule (KGBean dip, anyone?). The décor does skew kitschy — Khrushchev-era knickknacks in a homey-babushka setting — but the chef Bonnie Morales, a first-generation American of Russian parents (her maiden name is Frumkin), does an admirable job of enlivening a cuisine known for its stodginess by combining Slavic-inspired fare with a typically Portland emphasis on quality, locally sourced ingredients.

Even though Russian is the third-most-spoken language in Oregon, the diners are mostly bearded, English-speaking hipster types who gravitate here to party like it’s 1959 and munch on zakuski. Often translated as “vodka snacks,” these small plates are meant to complement a night of imbibing the “water of life.” The $25-per-person “Ruskie Zakuski Experience” fills the table with various small plates. I chose to order à la carte, starting with cured salo, slices of fatback (the hump of the pig) that manage to be both chewy and buttery.

My server was pushing the cholodetz — beef shank, veal feet terrine and hard-boiled egg in aspic — but I opted for the some­what more accessible Siberian pelmeni instead. The dumplings, stuffed with beef, pork and veal, bobbed in a dill and sour cream sauce and exploded with meaty flavor when bitten into. The beef tongue, which Ms. Morales prepares in a confit for 15 hours before searing it, is crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside, and when eaten with its semisweet onion sauce, one of the most satisfying dishes on the menu.

And, of course, you can’t have vodka snacks without the vodka. Kachka (the word means duck in Belarussian and Ukrainian and is a reference to a piece of Ms. Morales’s family history too elaborate to explain here) offers more than 50 brands hailing from as far as Russia and Moldova and as near as Oregon (plus a dozen or so infused varieties). House cocktails include a Kachka Negroni (vodka, a bitter liqueur called pelinkovac and two kinds of vermouth).

It’s not exactly Moscow. And that might be a good thing. But after enough vodka shots, walk a few blocks to the Willamette River and squint. Portland on the Moskva, maybe?